So you want to go to seminary?

This video has been making the rounds on Facebook recently. As much as it makes me laugh (“rural North Dakota”, whoever made this was clearly Lutheran ☺), I struggled with the video because in between offensive comments the man asked some tough questions and the woman had no good answers. All she could offer were cliqued quips that sounded even more naïve in the automated computer voice. I wondered: could I do any better?

The questions the video raised caught me off-guard. After all, I’m three years and a fair amount of student loans into this seminary experience. I also feel just as, if not more, called to be in this profession as I did when I started. But the man is right. I know all the statistics. Clergy do have the highest rates of alcoholism, depression and obesity, the moving constantly thing is hard, and there isn’t lucrative financial compensation. On paper, this seminary thing is crazy.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized, maybe there isn’t supposed to be a rational answer. I did not come to seminary because I listed the pros and cons and being a pastor came out as the best option. I came to seminary because it began to feel like the only option. Vocation, be it to seminary or the medical field or accounting, is the thing you find you cannot not do.

The woman in the video said she wanted to go to seminary because she was called by God. I would change the voice and say that I am in seminary because God called me. The action is all God’s. And no, it doesn’t make any logical sense. But faith doesn’t always make logical sense. That’s why it’s called faith. Following God’s call to seminary may not measure up to the world’s standards of success, but neither does following a carpenter’s son and a ragtag bunch of fishermen. So here I am. Naïve? Maybe. Idealistic? Probably. Called by God? Yes, I think that too. Dear man in the video, I’ll let you know how it turns out for me.

The Absurdity of Faith

This Saturday I set off the burglar alarm at church. Again. This time it was the one in the theater, set off by the draft of me opening the main doors because the theater doors did not get shut the night before. So I didn’t even know it was going off until the police arrived. After meeting the police officer, determining nothing was wrong, and showing him out of the building, I re-alarmed the system and left. I can never stay in the office after setting off the alarm; it makes me too jumpy.

Driving back to the vicarage I was so angry. “Why is nothing ever simple here!” I yelled at God. God, in her infinite wisdom, did not answer.

That afternoon I made a hospital call. I was coming off a bad experience at the hospital, so I had been dreading this all weekend. Not the visit itself, but having to face my fear and go back in the hospital. But after the burglar alarm, I found I wasn’t as scared any more. The absurdity of the day served to put things back into perspective for me, remind me of who was really in charge. The silent God wasn’t answering, but she was moving. Moving in my heart and soul and spirit to knock me down from my self-confidence, remind me of God’s confidence, and teach me to laugh again. Thanks be to God who comes in the unexpected, in the absurd. Thanks be to God, who moves.

Equal Under the Scantron Machine

My internship site is a polling place. As I sit in my office and work on a sermon for All Saints Day, a steady stream of people have been walking past my window all day, off to do their civic duty. I am easily distracted while sermon writing, so I admit I have spent most of my day staring out the window, amazed at the broad swath of people coming to vote. Business people in sharp suits, single mothers with small children, older people, younger people, people pushing walkers and pushing strollers. What has captured my attention is the equality of all of these people in the action of voting. Everyone gets one vote, no more and no less. Our government is no paradigm of perfect representation, and we can talk about barriers to voting, hanging chads, gerrymandered districts and the like, but in its purest form there is something amazing about an election. In a nation so divided by race and class and access to power, we are all equal in the eyes of the great scantron machine that counts the ballots.

This week we are celebrating All Saints Day. This is a day for remembering, creatively enough, all of the saints. Not just the ones with great wisdom or knowledge or ability to perform miracles, but the ordinary, everyday saints as well. Saints like you and me. So on this election day in the middle of All Saints week, I remember that in God’s eyes we are all saints, all equal in the loving embrace of God.